How to enable the new File Explorer in Windows 11 Build 25276 and above

We recently covered that Microsoft is working on a huge update for the built-in File Explorer app. It will include a new left pane, a new start page with extra details for recently used files. Finally, it will have several new panels, such as "Activities", "Conversations", "Shared Status", and "Insights".  The latter can now be enabled.The information about new features has been discovered in build 25276. It includes an updated Details panel that sports the following now-working sections: "Insights", "Activities", "Properties", "Related Files", "Related Conversations" and "Sharing status".

The "Activities" section will display information about the latest changes made to the selected file. The "Related Conversations" section will let you know which emails or messages the file was part of. It is interesting to see how the "Related Files" section displays other files linked to the current one. E.g. it can show other files that were shared for the same project, or attached to the same email.

The new details pane is hidden by default, but you can enable it with ViveTool.

Before proceeding, keep in mind that it is a work in progress. The implementation is raw and buggy. Reset the feature using the undo command, otherwise you will hit into File Explorer crashes. The undo command is provided below.

Here's how.

Enable new File Explorer with Insights, Activities and other panes

1. Start with downloading ViveTool from GitHub,
2. For your convenience, extract the app to the c:\vivetool folder.
3. Now, press Win + X or right-click the Start button and select Terminal(admin).
4. To enable the new panes in File Explorer, type the following command in Terminal and press Enter: c:\vivetool\vivetool /enable /id:38613007.
5. Now restart your  Windows 11 PC.

You are done!

It is easy to revert the changes by running the undo command. Replace /enable  with /disable and issue it, i.e.

c:\vivetool\vivetool /disable /id:38613007

Don't forget to run it in the Terminal opened as Administrator.

Thanks to PhantomOcean3 for sharing their findings. They also noted that if the above procedure failed for you, you should try enabling the Insights features inside a Windows Sandbox instance of the OS.

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